A former football player for Notre Dame and the Kansas City Chiefs, Michael Oriard is Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at Oregon State University. He is author of four previous books on American sport and sports literature, including Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle, which focuses on the sport from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century.

"[Oriard] captures the self-aggrandizing illogic of the game's cultural role in his absorbing study of early 20th-century culture." - New York Times; "Oriard's detailed and well-written work shows us how the game has been constructed through notions of national, gendered and ethnic - and, as he insists, also class - identities." - Journal of American Studies"